Lucas loses the force on recut DVDs

I just got the new “Star Wars” DVDs, and I want to punch George Lucas more than ever before…. I just got the new “Star Wars” DVDs, and I want to punch George Lucas more than ever before.

There is a phrase that critics overuse to a ridiculous degree: To Capture the Imagination.

The original Star Wars trilogy did just that. Lucas knows it did.

What he doesn’t understand is that it did so by — say it with me — capturing our imaginations.

That is, by giving us just enough details to allow us to identify with the characters and become involved with the plot — and then leaving the rest of the movie for us to personalize and use our imaginations to make it our own.

Think of the ice monster on Hoth. In the original version of that scene, we don’t see the monster. We got hints of him: a roar in the distance, a monstrous arm, a terrified look in Luke’s eyes as he hangs upside down from the cave ceiling and desperately reaches for his light saber.

That’s where we come in. We identify with the character Luke Skywalker, and Luke is terrified — therefore, we are terrified. The monster thus becomes anything that terrifies us. He is the demon in our closet; he is the red-eyed horror under our beds who reflects our anxiety.

When Lucas changed that scene for the Special Editions, he might have frightened some people, but the abominable snowman stopped scaring me the day Hermey the Elf took out all of his teeth and put the star on top of the Christmas tree. I’m afraid of having to make the rent next month, of whether I’ll be sent to fight in a foreign war and of certain strange things I might see after eating psilocybin mushrooms.

This is one small example. After all, we saw all of the other monsters in the trilogy; seeing the ice monster doesn’t make things that much worse.

But knowing how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader does. This is the centerpiece of the prequel trilogy, the story of how a good man succumbs to evil. Thus, it is the part of the lore that was most left to the viewers by the original trilogy. We were left to think that Anakin Skywalker had to have fallen to evil exactly as we believed a good man might.

Thus, it was a cautionary tale: Be careful, Young Steve, or you may become the most evil villain in the galaxy.

Thus, it was a tragedy: Weep, Kind Steve, for a man no different from you became the slave of unimaginable evil.

Thus, it was a source of inspiration: Take heart, Cruel Steve; despite all your sin and wretchedness, you may still be redeemed.

Telling us that story in the direct and explicit form in which we can safely anticipate it will be told — because if there’s anything the new “Star Wars” films are especially lacking in, it’s anything remotely resembling subtlety — in “Revenge of the Sith” this May will shatter those qualities of Anakin’s story forever.

So what has Lucas done with these new releases that I find so egregious, on top of the established prequel travesties and the changes that he has already made to the original trilogy?

Well, not a whole lot. But he has put Hayden Christensen into the end of “Return of the Jedi.” And now there’s a new the-Empire’s-defeated-celebration scene on Naboo, in which we oh-so-faintly hear that living embodiment of Lucas’s failed imagination, Jar-Jar Binks, exclaim “Weesa freeeeeee!” He has now directly connected the prequel trilogy to the original movies. So now, I have a much harder time pretending that Jar-Jar never existed (which he didn’t) and that Anakin Skywalker was never a whiny teen-age android.

Every time a story is told, it ceases to be the storyteller’s. The teller only provides half of the tale; the rest we fill in ourselves. This is part of the true magic of storytelling — the intimacy it creates between the teller and his or her audience, no matter how physically separated they may be.

George, “Star Wars” ceased to be yours back in 1983 when “Return of the Jedi” was released. After that, you had no more right to change it than I do.

I can only hope that, after you die, some kind soul will have the decency to re-release the original trilogy — maybe with the updated special effects and that new scene between Luke and Biggs on Yavin but with all the other new crap cut out.

Or, that some present-day computer geek will have that on the Internet within the next couple of days.

Come on, guys: Get to work!

E-mail Steve Thomas at tokath55@yahoo.com.